Wow! What an awesome event! This was my first StirTrek, and although I had heard stories about it in the past, to actually experience it was something very different. Watching presentations with on movie theater screens is quite impressive. We posted some photos from StirTrek on our Facebook page. Congratulations to the organizers and volunteers for an outstanding event! Oh yeah, The Avengers is a great movie, too.

Attended: One ASP.NET

I enjoyed the chance to see the always entertaining Scott Hanselman present the latest news on One ASP.NET. There is a lot to like in the next version of ASP.NET. As Scott said, "Visual Studio can't move at the speed of the Internet." Currently, when we create an ASP.NET project, we have to choose between WebForms, Web Pages or MVC. Scott showed one possible change to VS 11, where we'll create an empty ASP.NET project, and all ASP.NET templates are installed as NuGet packages. WebForms, Web Pages and MVC can live side by side in the same project. The idea is to "use what makes you happy".

If you missed the announcement the other week, the entire ASP.NET stack has been open sourced, and accepts contributions. It's all available in a Git repo at http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/.

The ASP.NET WebAPI is looking awesome. JSON will be the default, and we can use dynamics as the object types to better handle JSON objects.

ASP.NET Membership is getting a big upgrade, with OAuth providers for Windows Live, Google, Facebook and Twitter identities. Of all things I saw in Scott's talk, this was the most exciting to me, because identity is so important, but people want fewer and fewer profiles.

WebForms is getting some nice enhancements. According to Scott, only about 12% of ASP.NET sites are MVC. In addition to the routing and model binding currently in WebForms (but not well known), unobtrusive validation and async are also coming to WebForms.

Finally, in the SignalR.Sample package is a new stock ticker sample, and in another breaking news announcement, SignalR has been accepted as part of the ASP.NET stack, will ship with VS11, and will be supported by Microsoft.

Presented: Building Windows 8 Applications with HTML and jQuery

As I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, it's heavier on slides than code, because we have a new OS, a new IDE and a completely new development paradigm. There's a lot to cover, and I wanted these slides to be useful when you got home. You can download them from Windows 8 Metro Apps with HTML and jQuery Slides. We'll have the code ready to share when we're comfortable that VS 11 and Windows 8 have reached a stable point. There were drastic changes between Developer Preview and Consumer Preview, which completely broke the previous version of this sample. Once that happens, I'll post the code. If you'd like to know as soon as I post the code, you can follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/rj_dudley.

In the demo, I used WijmojQuery UI widgets. Wijmo brings tremendous capabilities to websites, and is one option for developing WinJS applications. If dedicated controls are more your style, hang in there, we'll have controls for both XAML and HTML WinRT applications. Stay tuned for those!

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About Rich Dudley

For an entire decade, Rich inhabited cubicles at several companies in the same office park, eventually leading a team of developers building data warehouses, web-based BI applications and integrating mission critical systems. Rich has been working with Azure since the early beta days, with Windows Phone 7 since before you could leave one in a bar, and is co-author of "Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development" from Packt Publishing (http://bit.ly/msazurebook). Follow Rich on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/rj_dudley.